Asian Telecom Operator Disrupts Market, Driving Digital Transformation throughout the Nation

Being a new player in the telecommunications market, the operator was not hampered by legacy technology investments and wanted to start off using the latest best practices and innovations. To accelerate time to market for a new portfolio of digital services consumed at massive scale, the company decided to deploy an OpenStack private cloud for their software teams. The company was adopting a microservices-based culture and organizational structure and wanted to enable each software team to independently develop, deploy and scale their own offerings, instead of having to wait for a central IT team to provision or scale resources.

To accomplish this, the operator wanted to partner with an OpenStack vendor who had proven success with global telecommunications leaders and the expertise to quickly scale cloud resources for each app to support more than 100 million subscribers.

Solution

The company decided to evaluate Mirantis, based on its successful deployment of the world’s largest OpenStack cloud for one of the world’s biggest telecommunications companies, as well as Mirantis’ leadership within the OpenStack community as one of its top contributors of code. They commenced with advisory services, OpenStack training, and a proof-of-concept (PoC) deployment with dozens of nodes.

After the success of the PoC, the two companies set forth to build up the operator’s cloud infrastructure, first focusing on establishing a robust cloud foundation that could help drive innovation and provide key capabilities. By 2015, the operator began scaling its platform, introducing additional clouds in other regions, adding world-class capabilities, and enabling key products and initiatives.

Initial deployments were based on Mirantis OpenStack with Tungsten Fabric and Ceph storage, and the company has since then transitioned to Mirantis Cloud Platform (MCP), a flexible infrastructure platform that automates cloud updates and upgrades by following principles of Infrastructure as Code. Mirantis provided architectural and design services; deployment, upgrade, integration, workload onboarding and other engineering services; training and 24×7 support. By the time the operator was ready to launch in 2016, the operator had several clouds in production across multiple cities, spanning hundreds of nodes.

Results

After its public launch, the operator attracted 16 million subscribers in its first month, the fastest ramp-up by any mobile operator in the world. The company enrolled 100 million subscribers in only 170 days — or an average of 7 customers per second — making it the fastest adoption of any technology service in the world, surpassing Facebook, WhatsApp and Skype. Besides making voice calls completely free with no roaming charges, the operator also offered some of the lowest data rates in the world, costing about $2 per month with unlimited data, and free feature phones with a 3-year subscription. Today, the company has more than 400 million subscribers.

Launching Digital Services at Massive Scale

When the operator goes live with a digital service, it has the challenge of going live with millions of users. The operator currently offers anyone using their SIM card a full suite of digital services at no cost, including applications for TV, movies, music, magazines, payments, messaging, VoIP, file storage, retail point of sale, taxes, healthcare, and more, which all run on OpenStack private clouds.

“The time it takes to deploy a cloud control plane for us is about 19 hours. It takes us two hours to deploy our compute rack, and it takes us three hours to deploy our storage rack. We really love it,” he added. “MCP has really been a game changer for us in automation.”

MCP automates the deployment, updates and upgrades of clouds, reducing manual work and errors. “The model-driven architecture that Mirantis has come up with has helped us save a lot of time and effort,” the VP of Engineering said. “We define our inventory in code and the inventory gets deployed automatically using CI/CD.” MCP also streamlines cloud management with its StackLight Operations Support System (OSS), which provides continuous monitoring of cloud infrastructure and application workloads.

In early 2016, Mirantis began transitioning cloud operations to the operator’s internal cloud team, who are now able to manage cloud deployment and operations on their own. Mirantis continues to assist the operator with architecture, other consulting services, and 24×7 enterprise support.

“We really value the partnership with Mirantis,” the VP of Engineering said. “Mirantis has trained us on using the concepts of GitOps, infra as code, automated deployments and the toolchains that come with the Mirantis product.”

The operator’s OpenStack cloud is one of the largest in the world. It includes eight application datacenters running 4,000 bare metal servers across three regions in the country, with roughly 100,000 CPU cores. Further expansion is already planned, and the operator expects to soon have 10,000 bare metal servers. Additionally, the operator has 13 network datacenters that carry network traffic across the country.

“We had to deploy private clouds when we were launching, because there were the government regulations. The Telecom Regulatory Authority mandates that any telecom company [in the country] has to store customer data inside the country,” the VP of Engineering. “None of the other cloud providers are big enough to host our workloads, so we made all this infrastructure ourselves, and we’re still growing.”

About 50 internal software teams consume the operator’s OpenStack cloud. These teams provision their own cloud resources and can rapidly deploy and scale their own offerings as needed. With MCP, developers have the flexibility to deploy the type of cloud resources they prefer, including VMs, containers or bare metal compute. The operator built a Kubernetes-as-a-Service platform on top of OpenStack to provide developers with a self-service portal where they could get a Kubernetes cluster with the click of a button.

“We don’t define how the microservices teams work, and that’s what you want in your organization. You don’t want to define standards for your teams, you want to let them innovate and figure out their own,” the VP of Engineering said. “Some teams want baremetal, some teams want Kubernetes, some teams want to use typical monolithic environments.”

Transforming Society

By offering free voice calls and text messaging throughout the country, unlimited data access at affordable rates, premium content and applications at no cost, to all citizens, the operator shook up the country’s telecom industry, forcing incumbent operators to slash prices and causing consolidation in the market. More importantly, the operator has also helped to disrupt the country’s society, by making communications and data more accessible and bridging the urban-rural digital divide.

With such achievements, the operator has become an indispensable leader in the country’s digital revolution, as the country aspires to both improve the lives of its citizens and expand its influence in the world digital economy.